Electrical distribution equipment, including switchboards, switchgears, and motor control centers, use busbar conductors to connect circuit breakers and other protection equipment to loads. Conventionally, the busbar conductors include one or more vertical busbars, conventionally called “risers,” and one or more horizontal busbars. Existing busbar conductors include one or more flat conductors depending upon the desired current rating or ampacity of the distribution equipment. Other risers have an L-shape or U-shaped profile, but as the length of these conductors increases, the temperature of the surrounding air due to natural convection increases, resulting in poor thermal dissipation and current distribution. In the case of flat busbars, to counteract the adverse thermal effects, additional flat busbars are stacked together, but at the cost of an increase in the amount of expensive copper.
A related problem is a phenomenon called the “skin effect,” which holds that the current density near the surface of the conductor is greater than at its core. Specially Flat busbar conductors exhibit a relatively poor current distribution due to skin effect because of the planar surfaces and sharp transitions presented to the electrical current. Moreover, in multi-phase systems, adjacent busbars are subjected to another undesirable phenomenon called the “proximity effect,” which relates to how current flowing through one phase interferes with current flowing through an adjacent phase. As a result of the proximity effect, current tends not to be distributed evenly throughout the conductor cross-section, but rather tends to crowd to the side closest to an adjacent phase conductor. As a result, some laminations of one phase conductor can get hotter than others in the same phase, resulting in uneven current distribution throughout the laminations composing a conducting phase.
Shaped busbars are typically extruded from a mold, which is expensive and it is difficult to modify the mold when changes need to be made to the busbar profile. What is needed is at least an improved busbar system, an improved way of manufacturing busbars, and an improvement in the proximity effect present in existing polyphase busbar systems. The aspects disclosed herein are directed to addressing or solving these and other needs.